


If Love Is Life

by orphan_account



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Not Hockey Player(s), M/M, Paranormal Investigators, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-20
Updated: 2016-07-20
Packaged: 2018-07-25 13:32:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7534627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“But Jonny, <i>Ghost Busters</i>.”</p><p>--- </p><p>Or, Jonathan Toews goes to camp to get fixed. Instead, he gets Patrick.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Love Is Life

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Madelyn's FINISH 1988 challenge and WOW!! This could not have happened during a worse month for me :') But VOILA, one finished 1988 fic (on time!!) for everyone to enjoy and for me to move into the COMPLETED folder :) Title is from Tv On The Radio's DLZ.
> 
> Huge thanks to starzgrl for the beta! She took my fuddled mess and guided it to a better place, so ten thousand thanks to her! 
> 
> One amateur ghost hunters Jonny and Pat fic, coming right up! I hope you all enjoy!

 

Jonny goes to a nondenominational retreat somewhere in the southern Appalachians that next summer after the accident. He’d gone to sing kumbaya and maybe smoke a little weed, though the retreat itself was actively distancing himself from the Scary Real World under the pretense of learning about God and why bad things happen to good people. He’d gone to learn how to be normal again.He doesn’t really get any of that - instead, it’s when he’s on a midnight trip to the outhouse that Jonny gets Patrick. 

“Hey, Jonny, I’ve been meaning to catch you.”

Jonny’s leaving the bathroom when he stops, hands still damp because the driers in there are for shit. Jonny follows the voice and finds Patrick leaning against the cinderblock wall, face washed out and gross in the yellow light above their head. Gnats are blessedly attracted to the light instead of their sweat, and despite the fact that it smells a bit like industrial tile cleaner and Jonny’s pretty sure his boxers are sticking to his balls with sweat, he joins Patrick by leaning as well and studies him. Patrick’s zitty and his hair brings to mind the term _federal disaster area_ , but his eyes are wide and almost seem to glow a bit in the night.

He’d sort of met Patrick the first day of camp, he thinks, before he’d gotten himself sorted into Hawk House and Patrick had gone to join his bros in Turtle House; if he had, it had been in that way that he’d met everyone just a little - a circle of general introductions, the _I’m Jonny from Winnipeg_ just like everyone else’s. Patrick’s face and name had gone forgotten in the sea of same-colored shirts reeking of Backwoods Off and thirteen brands of deodorant, so it’s odd, he thinks, that Patrick seems to remember _him_. 

Two days ago one of the other campers in Snake House had reportedly whipped it out over the back deck after dinner and gotten a mosquito bite on his dick for it. That was the only reason Jonny was down there, beaten path awkward and just a little dangerous in the inky black night otherwise. The starlight had barely been enough to keep him from tripping and twisting an ankle, the yellow light of the cinderblock outhouse attracting him like it attracted the gnats. He probably could have held it until morning.

Patrick’s face is as still as the lake just barely visible over his shoulder. Jonny wonders if he’s supposed to say something, or if it’s okay that he’s standing still, just staring at Patrick like he’s trying to memorize his face. 

“I played hockey, too,” Patrick says, and Jonny turns his face out to the woods. There was a reason Patrick was here, then.

“Concussion, for me. I can’t even fucking drive anymore.” 

He isn’t sure why he’s telling Patrick when it feels like broken glass in his mouth to himself, even. He knows, though, when Patrick responds with, “My parents couldn’t afford it anymore. No scholarships, either. Nobody wants to give money to the little guy.”

Jonny hasn't cried in front of anyone since the day the physical therapist came in and told him the big No to hockey. He doesn’t cry now, but his throat is thick and his sinuses throb painfully against it. He has no idea why he does it, but he reaches out and grabs Patrick’s hand, threading their sweaty fingers together and tangling them beyond separation. Patrick’s return grip is quick, and thought he tightness in Jonny’s throat gets worse, he feels better, he thinks.

Patrick’s mouth is wet and red around the words he speaks in the next heartbeat. “You believe in ghosts?”

Jonny’s concussion at the age of seventeen - God, was it already a whole year ago - had put the nail in the coffin for his hockey career. He’d gone from a step away from athletic godhood to crippling anxiety attacks behind the driver’s seat and therapist visits his family could barely afford every Tuesday at three thirty. 

He thinks about what he’s heard about ghosts, how when people die with strong emotions, they linger. If he could choose, he’d haunt a rink, he thinks. But he probably wouldn’t get to choose. It would probably be the emergency room he could barely remember. Or the driver’s seat of Dan’s truck. Or Dan.

“Maybe?” he answers. It’s so fucking hot outside he kind of wants to strip off all his clothes and fling himself into the lake to die, but he looks at Patrick’s kind of shy smile and somehow thinks about edging just a little bit closer instead.

“Yeah? Let’s find out,” Patrick says, and oh, he’s got dimples.

\----------

College is weird, but he and Patrick end up at the same place that fall - _end up_ , he muses, as if he hadn’t specifically chosen the college in Chicago Patrick had chosen, just because - just _because_. Classes are classes, and while he’s pretty sure Patrick’s time-consuming math major is going to do him a lot more favors than Jonny’s general studies major, Patrick has been a real sport about helping him with the paper mache geography projects and the vocab notecards. 

By the time summer rolls around, Patrick has _plans,_ shared over fifty cent highway maps and a dimpled smile. Jonny’s embarrassingly easy for it.

Jonny picks up their first official camera off Amazon for like, fifty six bucks. It’s not great, but it works out all right since the grainy night vision makes it look even spookier in dark houses. It works just fine on their LCD screens when they’re wandering around in the dark stubbing toes and getting splinters and inhaling dust and mold, and - 

“It has a little thingy to connect to the computer,” Patrick observes one afternoon, fingers poking around the plastic cover as he turns the camera in all directions. They’ve only been to a couple of old abandoned warehouses in the area, so dropping the cash on a nicer unit hadn’t felt appropriate yet. Still, Pat walks around with the one he’d dug out of his grandfather’s attic, and Jonny’s kinda into the way Patrick’s eyes go wide as he looks Jonny’s over.

“It’s to upload the videos,” Jonny preens. He’d had to mow an extra lawn to afford it, but it was worth the twelve dollars extra for the feature. 

“Like, to the internet?” Patrick asks, eyes now looking at Jonny instead of the camera. Oddly, Jonny is even more into that.

“Uh, yeah, I guess,” Jonny says. “I mean, I’ve just been saving them onto my computer for now, just so we can look at it.” He’d spent the last couple of weekends at the library, wondering if he should bring it up to Patrick because it was - it was a _hobby_ , just something they were going to do for fun to break up their otherwise monotonous summer as broke college kids in Chicago - “I was reading this book on like, things we could get to - to do this for real, y’know, and I think we should - If you wanted, we could - ”

“ _Yes_ ,” Patrick hisses, tongue between his teeth and grin wide. 

\----------

“But Jonny, _Ghost Busters._ ”

“Do you _want_ to get sued?!”

\----------

Patrick decides that Jonny should get a chance being on camera for their tenth Youtube episode. The target for tonight is an abandoned warehouse somewhere in south New York, apparently haunted by thirteen ghosts that spelled your middle name wrong with macaroni noodles just before you were attacked. It’s ridiculously silly and almost definitely bullshit, but their channel, Sticks and Bones (Jackie’s idea, and when Patrick had laughed, Jonny had voted yes), has almost has a thousand subscribers and Jonny’s feeling good enough about life to agree. 

“Are there any ghosts in here?” Jonny asks, holding out their brand spanking new voice recorders for a possible EVP. They’re new enough to this that he still feels kind of stupid while waiting for any potential answers, but it’s not his first time, so he doesn’t rush over it again. Worse, probably, are the boxes of macaroni noodles they’ve stationed around the room to entice the ghosts to come mess with them.

Jonny steps to the side to get a different angle in the room, and when he does, he accidentally toes over the box of macaroni noodles by the conveyor line all over the concrete floor. It’s probably because it’s pitch black, and probably because Patrick probably doesn’t know it’s Jonny - but Patrick makes this yelping noise that reminds him of this one time his neighbor’s three-legged cat fell into a half-full bathtub.

Jonny _totally_ ruins the shot by laughing, but Patrick joins in a moment later and it’s all good.

\----------

They go to some bed and breakfast in the ass crack of Georgia the night after they post their two year anniversary video. Jonny had spent almost a week pulling clips from their old videos, pulling fan favorites, pulling some of Patrick’s most ridiculous screams - he’d even manned up enough to pull all the dumb faces he makes when he’s scared. 

It had struck him at the time that he’d known Patrick for almost three years by now, met him at that stupid camp and somehow got to this point now where they were sort of best friends, sort of living together in that nomadic, gross hotel rooms and blow up mattress in the back of a van kind of way.

“Were you killed by Leonard Dothan?” Patrick asks into the room, hair ruined by the humidity and eyes almost silver in Jonny’s too-bright LCD screen. Pat’s shoulders are squared and confident, body turning all around to catch the most sound and hands reaching out into the muggy humidity to gauge the temperature around him. Fucking August in the south, really. 

Even on the LCD screen, Jonny can see that Patrick’s shirt is drenched with sweat, clinging to Patrick’s curves like it’s trying to cop a feel. Jonny kind of relates. He hadn’t really noticed in real time, he thinks, but looking back at it - _literally_ looking back at it, while making the anniversary video - Patrick’s gotten kind of beautiful in the two years they’ve been doing this together, all freckles and long limbs and a crooked smile that Jonny kind of sort of really wants to kiss right off his face.

“Oh _shit,_ ” Jonny says when the thought actually processes, and Patrick’s close in a heartbeat, skin too hot and slick against Jonny’s like they’re fucking and not sweating it out in a room that smells like old linen and dust. His night vision camera is digging into his left forearm a bit, Patrick’s voice is excited as he holds the digital recorder into the pitch-black room, and Jonny’s stomach is somewhere around the chamber pot with the cherubs on it, probably.

“Jonny, Jonny, what?” Patrick asks, fingers tight around Jonny’s bicep. “Did you catch something?”

_Yes,_ Jonny wants to say, because on what planet would he want to - to _kiss_ Patrick Kane and not have some kind of _disease_? Patrick Kane, who eats burritos and talks with his mouth full, who laughs until orange juice comes out of his nose at Jonny’s stupid jokes, who whines about too-cold hotel rooms and missing the van as he crowds into Jonny’s bed before passing out on top of the sheets. Patrick, who, Jonny realizes, maybe he’s wanted to kiss for a very, very long time.

“I thought I did, but no,” Jonny says. He expects Patrick to back away; instead, Patrick sighs out, hand dragging down Jonny’s arm slowly and sending shivers in its wake. 

“We’ll check it out in review,” he says, and Jonny licks his lips to croak out the _yeah okay_ he can barely manage as it is. Patrick’s hand squeezes tight on his bicep, just a hint of pressure against muscle, and then he’s back into the middle of the room, hunched over to fiddle with the electromagnetic field meters. Jonny directs the camera away from where he’d been using it to watch where Patrick was going, unable to take that much of Patrick’s ass in his face right now.

“Whoa - hey, Jonny, does this area feel cold to you? Jesus, get over here, would you? I think I heard the ball in the stairwell move.”

Jonny steps closer, hand extended and face peering into the endless black around him. He holds up the camerabackwards so he can look into the lens and describe for their viewers what could have caused the ball to move. He turns and looks at where he’s pretty sure Patrick is standing, keeping the camera on his right. It’s his best angle. 

\----------

Three months later, Jonny hears Patrick’s “Oh, _yes,_ ” while they’re scoping out the antebellum plantation in South Carolina Jonny’s been _dying_ to get onto the channel since he got the fanmail about it. 

Patrick had gotten a phone call and stepped to the side, leaving Jonny to poke around the mailbox and see if he could get a good shot of the second floor window _and_ the horse stable. As it is, Jonny has about three seconds of wide blue eyes and a dimpled grin before Patrick slings his arm around Jonny’s neck and digs his knuckles deep in Jonny’s hairline. 

“ _Ow,_ fucker - !”

“Hey, _hey_ , listen! _Do you know who that was?!”_ Jonny bites back a your mom joke, partially because it wouldn’t be funny considering how often it _is_ Patrick’s mom, but mostly because Patrick doesn’t give him a chance to take the opening. “That was Julia. _Julia._ ”

Pat’s got a speck of cilantro stuck in his teeth from where they’d stopped at some hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint off the dirt road getting here and he’s got some serious pollo asado sans margarita breath, but Jonny’s helpless to do anything but smile in return and think about how much he’s kind of crazy to want to kiss him anyway. It’s a feeling he’s gotten kind of used to.

“Julia... Julia? Travel Channel Julia?” Jonny clarifies, spine straightening as his face turns down to meet Patrick’s unabashed delight.

“ _Travel Channel Julia_ ,” Patrick repeats, waving his phone around in Jonny’s face. “She said to send her the materials for the next episode instead of posting it right away. For _review_.”

Jonny does his best to tamp down the excitement. Review is just - it’s nothing, really, no promise of their own show on an actual television, no promise of making it onto the network, no promise of anything except, at the very least, a delayed release to Sticks and Bones. But it’s _something._ It’s more than what they’ve gotten before, it’s a chance at making _real_ money doing this instead of just what little bit they’ve been pulling in from their almost four hundred thousand subscribers; it’s a _start_.

“So, this better be a good one, eh?” Jonny says, pulling the pamphlet for the plantation out of Patrick’s back pocket and flipping it open again. It’s covered in cheap gloss, but the pictures are good and the spooky red lettering promises a night of frights for any who dare to come after nightfall. 

The premise wasn’t anything unusual: down the hall of the second floor lots of people have seen the ghost of a woman who was brutally murdered, disembodied children laughing, dogs barking in the next county, blah blah blah; nothing they haven’t seen promised and undelivered anywhere else. But the scenery - _Jesus_ but it’s beautiful, all southern oaks and magnolias dripping with buttery sunshine, green grass and miles of blue and pink hydrangeas. It’s like a spread right out of Southern Living, and no haunting is quite as elegant as a southern haunting. A touch of civil war unrest here and there, locals interviewed for chilling stories - it all adds up for a nice nuance in an episode.

Patrick flips open the little notebook he carries with him and clears his throat dramatically before he starts reading his notes. “Ghost is Anna Grace Leesburg, murdered by her father who may or may not have been possessed by a demon, seen sometimes on the second floor and in the basement, but mostly in the window on the corner. A window fetish!” Patrick reads from a little notebook, turning towards Jonny and quirking an eyebrow. “Sounds like you two will get along nicely.”

Jonny is never drinking to excess with Patrick ever again and hates himself for feeling a bit warm at the back of his neck. As if Patrick didn’t totally confess his exhibitionist streak. 

“Shut the fuck up, _Showtime_.” Patrick’s response is a hissy bit of laughter, pink tip of his tongue caught between his teeth as he turns back to the notes. “Come on, let’s get to work. We’re about out of water and the nearest Piggly Wiggly is three miles back down Shithole Lane.”

Patrick mouths _Shithole Lane_ behind him, and they pack up into the van and head off down the dirt road. They get their stuff, then stop around town and catch a few interviews, get the release forms signed for their show, etc. etc. Same shit different day, except Jonny’s still stuck in the weird limbo of watching Patrick flirt with girls in pretty sundresses on camera only to get a softer set of blues eyes all to himself. Still, it’s a nice bit of episode filler before he and Patrick go into the location for the night, and it gives him material to use for cuts later when he’s balls deep in hours of endless green footage.

\----------

The next morning, they send the video in to Julia, then exhale together. Time to wait.

\----------

By the time they get back to the casino they’re investigating in Vegas two days later, it’s just in time for them to dig into the carry out they’d grabbed for dinner. Jonny’s fiddling with the cameras to make sure all of the memory cards are empty and the batteries are charged while Patrick does whatever bizarre Chinese finger trap juju it takes to get the EMF meters to work their magic. Jonny carefully doesn’t pay attention. He’d made the mistake once of watching Patrick’s delicate fingers fiddle with the wiring once before they had to go on camera - _once._

It’s usually Patrick who goes on the main camera these days - mostly because he’s got the whole pretty boy thing going on that he’s desperate to milk at every opportunity - and the boner incident had cemented that pretty much forever. Jonny’s kept up with the hockey workouts as much as possible with living on the road, and many Youtube comments beg for more candid shots of his ass or ‘fucking sick arms daddy’ but he’s quite content knowing he won’t be packing on the internet again, honestly.

When they’re ready to go, Jonny’s got the camera focused on Patrick’s face as the door shuts behind them and the moonlight disappears. Jonny adjusts his weight from one foot to the next and the wood creaks beneath his feet. _Perfect_.

The night begins as many of the others before; they walk around, scoping out the gadgets they’d placed earlier, following the paths to the places that were supposedly haunted and doing all their little tests. The Jacob’s Ladder snaps viciously without interference next to the blackjack table, the EMF refuses to go off no matter how many times they walk around the bar, and the ball in the fountain hallway _does_ move - but only because Jonny happens to know that the floors are rather uneven, which he demonstrates on camera with a plank of wood.

Midnight comes and goes. The third floor gets busted, the second floor gets busted, and the first floor gets busted. Patrick opens the creaky door down to the basement, and Jonny goes first, eyes locked on the LCD screen as he takes each step one by one. Patrick’s hands are heavy on his shoulders, letting Jonny guide their descent through a sightless void and _fuck_ that shouldn’t get Jonny right where he lives but it _does_ , because he’s always going to be a little fucking weird about Patrick and apparently going down the stairs to look for ghosts counts for romantic in his book now.

“How’s the new camera look?” Patrick asks when they reach the bottom, fiddling with the infrared camera they’d finally been able to afford with last month’s subscriber bonus. They’d sprung for it instead of a new van, but Jonny has to admit that he’s maybe got a few nice memories attached to the blow up mattress they stick in the back with the way Patrick curls around him after he falls asleep sometimes, so he’s okay with the choice.

“Looks good,” Jonny says, his camera and his eyes focused on Patrick before he almost groans at his own cheese.

“So apparently Mr. Sunders liked to have sketchy parties down here,” Patrick says into the camera, face just as distorted by the night vision on Jonny’s expensive camera as it had been on his cheap one their first episode. Somehow, that makes Jonny feel nostalgic and a little something else. Something like a little in love, he wonders.

“You wanna try to get an EVP?” Jonny asks, and across the room, Patrick pats at his ass to grab his digital voice recorder out of his back pocket. “Cameras three and four are set up just on the other side of that corridor, by the storage room. Should be good in case we have any activity.”

“You just want to show all this off from three angles, baby, it’s okay to admit,” Patrick says while flexing, leering into the camera and earning a disgusted scoff. 

“Patrick, stop flirting with the viewers and talk to the ghost.”

“Yeah, yeah, always hasslin’,” Patrick grumbles, thumbing at the digital recorder and turning it on. “Mr. Sunders, are you here with us?” Patrick pauses, giving any possible ghosts around time to talk into the microphone for Jonny to analyze later. “Are there any spirits in the room? What’s your name?”

Patrick walks by the storage room, where camera three is, and into the hall by camera four. Jonny’s got the tripods set just enough so the two don’t quite overlap, but he’s following in case anything suspicious happens. His eyes are locket on the LCD screen, scanning around to see if he can determine anything in the darkness. 

It’s after one of Patrick’s questions that there’s a faint buzzing in the room that has Patrick swearing and Jonny whipping his camera towards him to see what’s happening. “Pat - ?!”

“Shit, sorry, sorry, just my phone,” Patrick says, looking sheepishly just to Jonny’s left. “I forgot to turn it off.”

Jonny groans, opening his mouth to deliver yet another tirade about _turning off your fucking phone, Patrick, it might cause interference_ that’s honestly getting a little old, but he sees as Patrick grabs his phone out of his pocket and goes to turn it off, only to gape down at the screen. “What,” Jonny says flatly, not enough inflection in it to be a question as much as an implied _what the fuck_ he knows Patrick will understand.

“It’s Julia,” Patrick says, voice hushed, and that’s - 

“Travel Channel Julia?” Jonny says. He’s not looking at the LCD screen, doesn’t need to since Patrick’s got his phone screen illuminating his face, and Jonny thinks stupidly back to the way he’d looked like split pea soup in the yellow light outside the bathroom at that stupid church camp. He can’t help it; he gets closer, close enough to reach out and tangle his fingers in Patrick’s sleeve.

“We did it,” Patrick says, eyes cutting up to look at Jonny’s, blue eyes so wide and so very close. “We’re gonna have our own show.”

“ _Patrick_ ,” Jonny says, throat tight and chest full, because that’s all he _can_ say. Years of traveling across country, staying in hotels and getting used to sharing the same space, creeping around people’s basements and creepy second floors, here instead of lighting it up on the rink and finally, _finally_ okay with it - 

“Oh, fuck,” Patrick whimpers, and the light from Patrick’s phone disappears from Jonny’s face just as Patrick’s mouth slants beneath his in a mismatched kiss. Jonny’s gut goes red-hot, one hand clutching the camera and the other tangling in Patrick’s hair like it had been _waiting_ to do this. Patrick’s mouth is wet and open, because of course Patrick’s already a step ahead and just waiting for Jonny to catch up. Jonny tightens his grip, gets closer, lets his tongue feel the texture of the underside of Pat’s upper lip while riding the tingling sensation dancing down his spine. It’s electric, matching whimper for wet stroke as he takes and takes and takes. 

Patrick pushes hard, breaking the kiss. Somehow, Jonny knows not to panic in the split second before his back hits the wall and Pat’s back on him again. Instead, he drops the camera to the carpet beneath their feet and hauls Patrick in by his belt loops, spreading his legs and riding the thick thigh Patrick shoves between them. Patrick just fucking _eats_ Jonny’s moans, teeth digging into Jonny’s lip and tongue tracing the resulting divots before he sucks hard and gets Jonny’s tongue back in his mouth where he wants it. Jonny can’t fucking breathe, let alone think, suddenly aware that his skin-hungry hands are on at least one camera.

“Pat, Pat _fuck_ ,” he gasps, head falling back against the wall when he gets a hard suck to his pulse for breaking the kiss. “We, we gotta - ”

“God, I wanna ride your dick until dawn,” Patrick groans into his collarbone, and, well, Jonny’s only human.

\----------

“This is _grossly_ unprofessional,” Jonny says into the darkness, forearm flung uselessly over his eyes.

“Nah, just gross,” Patrick says, and smacks a sticky hand against Jonny’s chest. Fucking Christ.

“I can’t believe I wanted this,” Jonny sighs, getting an impatient huff in return.

“Yeah, well, I’ve wanted to do that for years, so suck it,” Patrick says, because everything is a fucking competition.

“Years?” God. Jonny _hates_ how that comes out, all... _breathless_ and _excited_.

The weight of Patrick’s head on his stomach disappears and Jonny can _feel_ the look Patrick’s giving him. He feels the blush before Patrick even opens his mouth. “Have you _seen_ you? No way you don’t know how good you look in those tight-ass swim trunks that stupid camp made us wear.”

And, huh. Jonny thinks of how Hawk House was right next to Turtle House, how it was quite possible that Patrick could have been waiting, _watching_ for Jonny to slip away on his own, how easy it would have been for him to say _bathroom_ to his counselor and make his way down a dirt path to wait outside in painted moonlight - 

Jonny reaches over, and Patrick smothers a giggly laugh in Jonny’s neck that’s got a touch of a breathless moan mixed in there somewhere. “Wow, again? Man, you’re _fun_ when you’re emotional.”

Jonny squeezes Pat’s dick a little harder to get him to shut the fuck up and is so, _so_ glad it’s dark.

\----------

The shot’s a bit blurry (he’s _really_ gotta replace that lens) and brilliantly green (brilliantly, _heinously_ , _so unflatteringly_ ), but seventeen minutes past two in the morning, halfway through the tape on camera four down the hall, Jonny finds it. Considering how much of their days and nights are spent on camera, Jonny supposes that it shouldn’t surprise him to find their first kiss (and fuck, whoops) on tape.

The video is silent, no microphone attached to keep from interfering with the digital recorders they use. The recording is as silent as the casino above them had been at the time, the deadened corridors letting Jonny hear every hitch in Patrick’s breath, each rustle of their clothes together, each wet slick of their tongues and the way Patrick’s breathing had hitched when he’d come white hot all over Jonny’s abs. He hadn’t been able to see it at the time, but Patrick’s come face is fucking _gorgeous_ , mouth open and wet even in the night vision. Jonny can’t wait to see it in person.

Even though he’s alone in the back of the van on their blow up mattress, hunched over the laptop to do the editing, and they’re kind of in the middle of nowhere on the way to Arizona for their next scouting, Jonny puts his hands to his cheeks to hide the warmth there. His eyes close as he remembers exactly how Patrick’s teeth had tugged on his lower lip, the texture of the underside of Patrick’s tongue, the way Patrick had pulled back and breathed that low _Jonny_ when he’d reached for his zipper that Jonny’s been unable to get out of his head since.

Jonny lowers his hands from his red cheeks and drags his finger along the mousepad. With a few clicks, he cuts out the incriminating clip then saves to his desktop, separate from the footage that’ll make its way to Julia’s people for their pilot episode. Camera three’s angle should suffice.

Just as he’s finishing up, two arms wrap around his neck from behind, Patrick’s breath tickling his jawline as he bracket’s Jonny’s body with his legs and cuddles up close. He smells like the air freshener Erica got them for the front seat of the van because he likes fiddling with it when he’s on the phone, and the smacking kiss to Jonny’s jawline is wet with probably Gatorade. “Hey babe, how’s the footage looking? Ready for our super awesome premier?”

Jonny thinks back to that one night they’d gotten shitfaced in the bar, the night he’d told Patrick about wanting to get fucked against the glass of a skyscraper overlooking the city night, how hot it would be to be _seen_. He thinks to Patrick’s red faced confession back about being on camera, all shy looks and wet lips from being licked. He thinks how he probably should have gotten the hint long ago. 

“Yeah, but I’ve got something even better for you to see,” he says, biting his smile and hitting play.

 

 


End file.
